Comment Calcanis is I (Score 1) 1
According to google guidelines, text links are spam. The thing is, if you genrate most of your traffic from google and use it to monetise your site, you pretty much work for google. It's unfair.
Submission + - Firefox 3 Performance Gets a Boost (cybernetnews.com) 1
jason writes: Mozilla has been working hard at making Firefox 3 faster than its predecessor, and it looks like they might be succeeding. They've recently added some significant JavaScript performance improvements that beat out all of the competition, including Opera 9.5 Beta. And it comes out to be about ten times faster than Internet Explorer 7! Things are really starting to fall into place for Firefox 3 Beta 4 which should be available in the next week or two.
Submission + - Ethnic Food in Space (environmentalgraffiti.com) 1
rtknox00 writes: For astronauts spending months in space, the smallest touch of home can make a big difference. So when South Korea's first astronaut Ko San boards the International Space Station this April he'll be bringing along a hefty supply of kimchi, the national dish of his native country. While bringing a cherished food on a long journey might seem like a simple act, taking kimchi into space required millions of dollars in research and years of work.
Electronic Arts Offers $2B For Take Two 173
quanticle writes "The New York Times is reporting that EA has offered $2B for Take Two Entertainment. The effort appears to be a move to consolidate the two companies before Take Two releases the next iteration of its blockbuster franchise, Grand Theft Auto 4. Take Two has politely declined the offer."
Reversing Magnetic Poles Observed in Another Star 49
Babu 'God' Hoover tips us to news out of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy that for the first time, a magnetic pole reversal has been observed in a star other than our own. Tau Bootis, while similar to the Sun, also has a planet more than six times larger than Jupiter orbiting at only a twentieth of the distance between Earth and the Sun. Scientists hope to use this discovery to learn more about the magnetic dynamics in the Sun, which can affect our telecommunications, among other things.
Half-Petaflop Supercomputer Deployed In Austin 130
SethJohnson writes "Thanks to a $59 million National Science Foundation grant, there's likely to be a new king of the High Performance Computing Top 500 list. The contender is Ranger, a 15,744 Quad-Core AMD Opteron behemoth built by Sun and hosted at the University of Texas. Its peak processing power of 504 teraflops will be shared among over 500 researchers working across the even larger TeraGrid system. Although its expected lifespan is just four years, Ranger will provide 500 million processor hours to projects attempting to address societal grand challenges such as global climate change, water resource management, new energy sources, natural disasters, new materials and manufacturing processes, tissue and organ engineering, patient-specific medical therapies, and drug design."
Researchers Reference Flocking Birds to Improve Swarmbots 62
inghamb87 writes "Scientists have studied flocks of starlings and cracked the mystery behind the birds' ability to fly in large formations, and regroup quickly after attacks, without getting confused and ramming into each other. While the information is cool, some scientists seem to think that the best use of this knowledge is not to aid our appreciation of nature, but to make more effective robot swarms. We've talked about swarming robots many times before, but usually researchers look to insects for inspiration."
Submission + - robotic swarm technology imitates nature (environmentalgraffiti.com) 1
inghamb87 writes: "Scientists have studied flocks of starlings and cracked the mystery behind the birds' ability to fly in large formations, and regroup quickly after attacks, without getting confused and ramming into each other. While the information is cool, some scientists seem to think that the best use of this knowledge is not to aid our appreciation of nature, but to make more effective robot swarms."
Submission + - RIAA drops another case (blogspot.com)
NewYorkCountryLawyer writes: "Once again the RIAA has dropped a case "with prejudice", this time after concluding
it was the defendant's daughter, rather than the defendant, that it should have sued
in the first place. In a White Plains, New York, case, Lava v. Amurao, mindful that in similar scenarios it has been held liable for the
defendant's attorneys fees (Capitol v. Foster and Atlantic v. Andersen), the RIAA this time went on the offensive over its attorneys fee exposure, even though there was no attorneys fee motion pending, arguing that it was the defendant's
fault — and not the RIAA's — that the record companies sued the wrong person, because the defendant didn't tell them that his daughter was the file sharer they were looking for."
Former OLPC CTO Aims to Create $75 Laptop 207
theodp writes "Mary Lou Jepsen, who left her One Laptop Per Child CTO gig on Dec. 31st, has reemerged with her sights set on a $75 laptop that will be designed by her new company, Pixel Qi, which is described as a 'spin-out' from OLPC. In a Groklaw interview, Jepsen calls for 'a $50-75 laptop in the next 2-3 years' and says it's time to go Crazy-Eddie on touchscreen prices as well."
This is probably good news to Bruce Perens, who thinks that the recent report of Microsoft's dual-boot XO project (with Windows as well as the Linux-based Sugar OS) is a feint driven by Microsoft's fear of "the entire third world learning Linux as children." Update: 01/10 21:22 GMT by T :
ChelleChelle adds a link to an excellent interview with Jepsen in the ACM Queue, in which she discusses OLPC and some of the technologies it contains.
Submission + - Robots can now bounce on water (environmentalgraffiti.com)
inghamb87 writes: "The way water striders walk on water was discovered years ago. The insect uses its long legs to help evenly distribute its tiny body weight. The weight is distributed over a large area so that the fragile skin formed by surface tension supports the bug on the water. However, the ability of water striders to jump onto water without sinking has baffled scientists, until now."
